Posts Tagged "illusion of the week"

Music videos by the alternative rock band OK Go are nothing if not creative. Their previous video “Here It Goes Again” featuring treadmill dancing was mesmerizing, and their newest video, “The Writing’s on the Wall”, is even more compelling, especially for those of us interested in matters of perception.

Expanding and contracting circles, mutating colors, and false image matches dominated the 2014 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, held on May 18th in the TradeWinds Island Grand in St. Petersburg, FL. One thousand perceptual scientists joined artists and the general public to determine the TOP THREE illusion masters from a pre-selected group of TOP TEN finalists, chosen by an international committee of judges. Each winner took home a trophy designed by the acclaimed Italian sculptor Guido Moretti: the trophies are visual illusions themselves.

If you’ve ever played with Legos, you know that they’re all about straight lines and 90-degree corners. Not in this version of Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s “Bulge” illusion. The strategically placed purple and white M&Ms distort your perception of the Lego checkerboard, making it bulge out.

Horking down a huge honking burger–American style–is considered unladylike in Japan. So Freshness Burger uses an unconventional approach to maintaining Ochobo–the Japanese cultural practice of maintaining small delicate mouth features in women. They use illusory replacement of the disgusting burger-eating pie-hole with the dainty and ladylike fake ochobo face mask.

Twelve years ago today, Photojournalist Mark D. Phillips captured the World Trade Center, engulfed in smoke and flames, seconds after the second plane attack. Unknown to Phillips at the time, the picture, distributed by Associated Press and published on the front pages of several newspapers, contained the face of none other than the Prince of Darkness.